Skip to main content
Cornell University
We gratefully acknowledge support from the Simons Foundation, member institutions, and all contributors. Donate
arxiv logo > cs > arXiv:2303.17548

Help | Advanced Search

Computer Science > Computation and Language

(cs)
[Submitted on 30 Mar 2023]

Title:Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?

Authors:Shibani Santurkar, Esin Durmus, Faisal Ladhak, Cinoo Lee, Percy Liang, Tatsunori Hashimoto
View a PDF of the paper titled Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?, by Shibani Santurkar and 5 other authors
View PDF
Abstract:Language models (LMs) are increasingly being used in open-ended contexts, where the opinions reflected by LMs in response to subjective queries can have a profound impact, both on user satisfaction, as well as shaping the views of society at large. In this work, we put forth a quantitative framework to investigate the opinions reflected by LMs -- by leveraging high-quality public opinion polls and their associated human responses. Using this framework, we create OpinionsQA, a new dataset for evaluating the alignment of LM opinions with those of 60 US demographic groups over topics ranging from abortion to automation. Across topics, we find substantial misalignment between the views reflected by current LMs and those of US demographic groups: on par with the Democrat-Republican divide on climate change. Notably, this misalignment persists even after explicitly steering the LMs towards particular demographic groups. Our analysis not only confirms prior observations about the left-leaning tendencies of some human feedback-tuned LMs, but also surfaces groups whose opinions are poorly reflected by current LMs (e.g., 65+ and widowed individuals). Our code and data are available at this https URL.
Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computers and Society (cs.CY); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2303.17548 [cs.CL]
  (or arXiv:2303.17548v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.17548
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

Submission history

From: Shibani Santurkar [view email]
[v1] Thu, 30 Mar 2023 17:17:08 UTC (4,405 KB)
Full-text links:

Access Paper:

    View a PDF of the paper titled Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?, by Shibani Santurkar and 5 other authors
  • View PDF
  • TeX Source
view license
Current browse context:
cs.CL
< prev   |   next >
new | recent | 2023-03
Change to browse by:
cs
cs.AI
cs.CY
cs.LG

References & Citations

  • NASA ADS
  • Google Scholar
  • Semantic Scholar
export BibTeX citation Loading...

Bookmark

BibSonomy logo Reddit logo

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)
  • About
  • Help
  • contact arXivClick here to contact arXiv Contact
  • subscribe to arXiv mailingsClick here to subscribe Subscribe
  • Copyright
  • Privacy Policy
  • Web Accessibility Assistance
  • arXiv Operational Status